Sadly you really can not legislate against free expression and the right to anonymity. You will see this shortly. Any attempt to protect citizens from hate will be used to silence legitimate criticism against Islam

(French court orders Twitter to reveal details of users posting anti-Semitism | JTA – Jewish & Israel News) — A French tribunal has ordered Twitter to divulge details about French users who posted anti-Semitic messages.Thursday’s ruling by a judge of Paris’ Grand Instance Court came in response to a lawsuit by the Union of French Jewish Students, which sought to limit the impunity with which Twitter users may disseminate anti-Semitic incitement.“It is a major precedent and breakthrough in the attempt to balance privacy online with the need to combat hate speech,” Sacha Reingewirtz, vice president of the Union of French Jewish Students, told JTA.The court, he added, imposed a pending fine of $1,300 against Twitter for every day in which it fails to deliver whatever details it possesses on users who are suspected of disseminating hate speech on Twitter. The ruling, Reingewirtz said, applies only to people who did so in France.Additionally, the ruling by the Paris court’s 17th chamber ordered Twitter to set up a system in which French users may flag anti-Semitic content, which would later be reviewed by Twitter before removal and possible referral to the authorities. The ruling was given at the court where a few dozen activists assembled alongside journalists.“Social networks were created as essentially democratic tools that are also being used by people who oppose democratic principles,” Nuno Wahnon Martins, director of European Affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JTA. “Like any democracy, the social networks also need to defend themselves and the first step is to deny those who spread hate speech anonymity as something to hide behind.”

Like usual the Jewish community is looking to government to resolve something that can not be resolved except through a Jewish state. Hatred is part of free expression. Groups like the @JIDF are a little more shrewd in that they do not turn to legislation and look to merely enforce already existing self imposed social network codes.

Aaron Swartz and Jonathan Pollard. So much in common. Not 100% innocent Jews, but their fate was probably flavored with AntiSemitism.

(Hey Jillian C York… Why didn’t you help me with my legal bills?)

(The father of information activist Aaron Swartz blames US prosecutors for his son’s death)Before his days with Apple, recalled Mr. Swartz, Jobs and his business partner Steve Wozniak “used to criminally defraud the phone company” by selling small “blue box” devices that allowed anyone in the country to conduct long-distance calls for free. Gates’ development of Microsoft’s BASIC, Swartz said, was “sketchy” at best. “These are people who are lionized,” he said, and “treated like idols in our culture.”

And so the conspiracies from Russia will be promoted like 911Truth. It is sad that no one offered to pay this guy’s legal bills when he was alive… now everyone will profit off of his death. The same conspiracy theorists that took advantage of a man of logic when he was alive will continue to spin this to their advantage and blame this on a free nation. It is one thing for a grieving father to defend his child. It is another thing for a news outlet like RT to shamefully report this.

Opened new version of Skype, and @aaronsw was at the top of the contacts list with his cartoonified avatar. 😦— Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) January 17, 2013

(Our Legal System Didn’t Give Aaron Swartz a Chance) In his book Three Felonies a Day, veteran defense attorney Harvey Silverglate warns that “the trend of ambitious prosecutors exploiting vague federal laws and pursuing criminal charges instead of more appropriate civil actions” makes potential criminals of us all. Redundant indictments for multiple offenses flowing from a single act — and threats of lengthy, life-destroying sentences — enable prosecutors to extort pleas from innocent or not-terribly-guilty defendants. It is often “nearly impossible for normal, rational, self-interested, calculating people to risk going to trial,” Silverglate observes. Moreover, the minority of people willing to take that risk may be deprived of the means to do so by pretrial orders freezing any assets allegedly generated by their alleged offenses.

Noah: People ask me why I took a guilty plea of misdemeanors when I set out to free information. Here is why. I’m alive. Adam Swartz is dead. I get to write this: Adam trusted in the system and his elitist Boston @EFF pals who did nothing. My mother asked me why I never contacted the ACLU. For a good reason I didn’t. These people are parasites. This Adam guy believed in justice and the system. I guess I’m a cynic… but I didn’t have to kill myself……… if this #hacker #AaronSwartz had gotten older he might of realized that his progressive buds @EFF and MIT were hypocrites. He took the fall for other people’s greed. If academia is funded by totalitarian governments and you are busy destroying the property in a free market then it doesn’t matter how much insider code you have. All the scum on twitter’s first year that were touting the open platform of twitter with RSS were the last people to bitch when the social networks turned into walled archetypes. The elite in these programs depend on the system that they rail against. Progressives are a lot like Muslims. They kill their own more than anyone else.

This weekend the internet mourned the loss of one of its folk heroes. Aaron Swartz, a co-creator of RSS and an early employee of popular link-sharing site Reddit, was found dead in his New York apartment on Friday. The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he’d be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant. He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress’s work was one of the decisive factors in last year’s victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.

Do a google search for ‘Noah David Simon’ and you can see they did to me what they did to Aaron Swartz. The difference with me is I could see my opposition. This guy was too far on the inside to realize that he was in the lion’s den. His crowd was with people who distributed a lot of Palestine propaganda… against free markets. Though Abbas leader of Fatah appears to claim to be Libertarian, Fatah started as a Socialist movement. You can realize that copyright is obsolete without railing against private property. Free markets recognize there are somethings you can not own. It doesn’t mean the government owns it. I’m sure Aaron’s friends feel they are closer to Libertarians, like Abu Mazen… but that just becomes sustaining an unsustainable system. It’s a lie either way. Socialist or Libertarian… it’s breaking the rules. Anarchy always defaults to tyranny.

If he had been found guilty of the charges, Swartz faced up to 35 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines, although it has emerged that negotiations between his lawyers and prosecutors had included a potential plea bargain of six months in prison. Condemnation of prosecutors over the litigation against Swartz continued on Tuesday. A petition to the Obama administration to remove Ortiz from office reached 28,188 signatures, past the crucial 25,000 signatures needed for a White House response. In July 2011, Ortiz said in a statement about the case: “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” Lawyers for Swartz said that, despite their best efforts, prosecutors had refused to negotiate a plea bargain which did not involve jail time. One also said that MIT refused to agree to a plea bargain in which Swartz did not serve time. Andy Good, Swartz’s initial lawyer, told the Boston Globe that he had warned one prosecutor, Steve Heymann, that his client was a “suicide risk”. Good said: “His reaction was a standard reaction in that office, not unique to Steve. He said: “Fine, we’ll lock him up.” I’m not saying they made Aaron kill himself. Aaron might have done this anyway. I’m saying they were aware of the risk, and they were heedless.” Lawyers for Swartz said they had offered to accept a deferred prosecution or probation, so that if he did it again he would serve time. Marty Weinberg, who took the case over from Good, told the paper he nearly negotiated a plea bargain in which Swartz would not serve any time. He said JSTOR signed off on it, but MIT would not. “There were subsets of the MIT community who were profoundly in support of Aaron,” but that support did not override institutional interests, Weinberg told the Globe. Another of Swartz’s attorneys, Elliot Peters, said on Monday that MIT officials were “very cooperative with prosecutors” during the investigation. “MIT could have handled things differently, rather than inviting law enforcement and turning it into a federal criminal case,” Peters said.

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.

the extreme measures of the prosecution merely reflect Anonymous and groups like EFF

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.

…actually that’s bullshit. Aaron came off looking like a good guy and guys like Noah David Simon (that is me) were libeled as stalkers of women. If anything Aaron realized that he had nothing to live for and it was probably because of this sicko culture he was a part of that encouraged him. He would not of been an insider unless he was mentally ill

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.

try attacking feminism for free expression and see how quickly Anonymous will abandon the martyr

We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.

that includes violent threats… if not then they should support the Jewish Internet Defense Force

Andrew Henderson watched as Ramsey County sheriff’s deputies frisked a bloody-faced man outside his Little Canada apartment building. Paramedics then loaded the man, a stranger to Henderson, into an ambulance.Henderson, 28, took out his small handheld video camera and began recording…. [A] deputy, Jacqueline Muellner, approached him and snatched the camera from his hand, Henderson said. “We’ll just take this for evidence,” Muellner said. Their voices were recorded on Henderson’s cellphone as they spoke, and Henderson provided a copy of the audio file to the Pioneer Press. “If I end up on YouTube, I’m gonna be upset.” …Randy Gustafson, spokesman for the Ramsey County sheriff’s office … said, “It is not our policy to take video cameras. It is everybody’s right to (record) … What happens out in public happens out in public.”One exception might be when a law enforcement officer decides that the recording is needed for evidence, he said. In that case, the officer would generally send the file to investigators and return the camera on the spot, Gustafson said….A week later, Henderson was charged with obstruction of legal process and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors. He had been filming from about 30 feet away, he said….The deputy wrote on the citation, “While handling a medical/check the welfare (call), (Henderson) was filming it. Data privacy HIPAA violation. Refused to identify self. Had to stop dealing with sit(uation) to deal w/Henderson.” …The allegation that his recording of the incident violated HIPAA, or the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is nonsense, said Jennifer Granick, a specialist on privacy issues at Stanford University Law School.The rule deals with how health care providers handle consumers’ health information.“There’s nothing in HIPAA that prevents someone who’s not subject to HIPAA from taking photographs on the public streets,” Granick said. “HIPAA has absolutely nothing to say about that.”

When Henderson tried to get back the camera, another deputy refused to release it, and said (Henderson also recorded this), “I think that what (the deputies) felt was you were interfering with someone’s privacy that was having a medical mental health breakdown. They felt like you were being a ‘buttinski’ by getting that camera in there and partially recording what was going on in a situation that you were not directly involved in.” Somehow the recording on the camera also vanished, though there’s a dispute over how that happened.It seems to me that there’s no legal basis for this prosecution, or for the seizure of the camera — Minnesota apparently doesn’t have any ban on such recordings, and in any event it seems likely that there’s a First Amendment right to record such police-citizen interactions in public places. (See Glik v. Cunniffe and ACLU v. Alvarez for cases recognizing such a right, in closely related contexts.) Nor can the police step in and punish the photographers in the name of protecting people’s privacy, just as the government may not stop TV stations from recording news footage in public place in the name of protecting people’s privacy.Thanks to Christopher Rohrbacher for the pointer.

Telecom companies across the world may be given the opportunity to dig through data passed across the Internet more easily following a move to allow the United Nations new authority to regulate the Web.At a conference in Dubai this week, Members of the United Nation’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) agreed to work towards implementing a standard for the Internet that would allow for eavesdropping on a worldwide scale.The ITU members decided to adopt the Y.2770 standard for deep packet inspection, a top-secret proposal by way of China that will allow telecom companies across the world to more easily dig through Web data, according to a report from Russia Today. The gathering which opened this week in Dubai of the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union has triggered fierce objections from Washington, and from Internet freedom activists who fear new rules that could end the freewheeling system of the Internet.The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday to oppose any efforts to give the United Nations new authority to regulate the Internet.The 397-0 vote, following a similar vote in the Senate, came as delegates were meeting in Dubai to revise a global telecom treaty, a gathering which some say could be used to impose new controls on the Internet.Representative Greg Walden said ahead of the vote that lawmakers should “send a strong bipartisan, bicameral signal about America’s commitment to an unregulated Internet.”He said Washington should not “stand idly by while countries like Russia and China seek to extort control over the Internet.”

The Internet controlled by the same countries that control the UN? Even though it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, in a decade or two this could become a major problem.Just imagine what Muslim countries could band together to do to the Internet.

Robert Muise and David Yerushalmi of American Freedom Law Center and Pamela Geller

What began as a clear first amendment issue has exploded into a landmark case regarding the the status of Islam as a political entity. Today the Detroit Transit Authority (SMART), a government entity, argued before the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals that our “Leaving Islam” ad was political because Islam is political. At least two of the three judges seemed to go along.If the Court rules against us, it will be ruling that Islam is political and that Sharia is a political program — something that other government agencies have strenuously denied. If that happens, will Islam and Sharia deserve the protection of a religion?The case was argued today before 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judges Raymond Kethledge, John Marshall Rogers and Algenon L. Marbley. Chris Hildebrand, the lawyer for Detroit SMART, began by referring to and based his whole argument on our recent victory over the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority in another First Amendment case about a completely different ad (a pro-Israel ad). Hildebrand argued that the Judge in that case, Paul Engelmayer, had said that that ad was political, and thus that the MTA had to accept it in accord with their guidelines. Hildebrand asserted that our “Leaving Islam?” bus ad, which Detroit SMART rejected, was also political, and thus was rightly rejected by SMART, which (in contrast to the MTA) does not take political ads. His client, said Hildebrand, does not reject ads because they’re provocative (as he claimed that ours was), or controversial, but because they’re political, and SMART does not and will not take political positions.Judge Rogers then told him that he had gotten SMART into a “blurry area” to be making a distinction between the political and religious. Hildebrand countered that while the ad may be anti-Islam, anti-Muslim, and anti-Sharia (actually it was designed wholly and solely to offer help to people whose lives were threatened), it was also political. Judge Marbley then pointed out that an imam, who would issue a fatwa (referring to the part of our ad that asked, “Is your family threatening you? Is there a fatwa on your head?”) was not an elected official.Hildebrand then dropped the bomb that has extraordinary implications for the debate about anti-Sharia laws and the status of Islam in the United States: he said that yes, imams have a religious function, but they also “control Sharia law,” and Sharia is political. Marbley said that that might be so in Iran, but not in Detroit, where they had a purely religious function. Hildebrand then dug in even deeper, saying that imams in Dearborn deal with Sharia on both a religious and political basis. When Marbley then asked him how our ad was different from one that SMART accepted from an atheist group, calling on people to become atheists, Hildebrand said that it differed because Islam is not only religious, but also a “political series of laws.” Marbley then pointed out that the same thing could be said about the Catholic Church, since the Vatican was a political entity, and that could be used to rule out advertising from Catholic groups. Hildebrand then argued that our ad was both religious and political, and that the reference to a fatwa made it primarily political and not religious — which would only be true if Sharia itself is primarily political and not religious.Judge Kethledge seemed to go along with this argument, telling our own lawyer, Robert Muise (who ably argued for our side), that Sharia is “arguably” political as well as religious. Judge Rogers then outrageously compared our ad to an ad repeating a vile and disgusting blood libel against the Jews as part of Jewish law (which it most certainly is not, but the death penalty for apostasy most certainly is part of the sharia) — showing the truth of his and Marbley’s admission that they knew next to nothing about Islam (or Jewish law). Clearly they were unaware of Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. If they did, they would never have said that our public service ad constituted “scorn and ridicule.”Kethledge clearly had his mind made up already, getting testy with Muise and helping Hildebrand with his case, inviting him when he returned to the stand to explain why our ad — designed to save lives — constituted “scorn and ridicule” of Muslims and thus was also disallowed on those grounds according to SMART’s guidelines. This entangled SMART in a self-contradiction: Hildebrand said that they didn’t disallow our ad because it was “controversial” but also that our ad constituted “scorn and ridicule” — but none of the judges seemed to notice and certainly no one challenged Hildebrand on this. Hildebrand did not, and could not, explain why our ad constituted scorn and ridicule, and instead simply kept asserting that it did. He did not argue his case persuasively, but with Kethledge and also Rogers so clearly on his side, he had a clear advantage.If SMART wins, however, the implications for the status of Islam and Sharia as political will be enormous. Incalculable. SMART may end up winning the battle for Sharia in the U.S., but losing the war.

Brain trust: Robert Muise, David Yerushalmi and Robert Spencer confer after the hearing

ok… thought about this some more. Peanuts can be a substitute Protein which would offend the meat industry. Thus Peanuts are political and can be banned by “SMART”. Peanuts are political, therefor we can ban Jimmy Carter who grows Peanuts. Islam is political, but then why was Islam posting on SMART? But being against Islam is Political… double standard. Peanuts could be a religion too? Give me five minutes and I could find away to yarn that one. The court needs to admit it’s bias and push this to a higher court if they are thinking about this.

In a unique case in Britain, a 25-year-old man has been sent to jail for 18 weeks for posting mocking video and messages about teenagers who had died and were being memorialized on sites such as Facebook. Sean Duffy posted defaced pictures of the teenagers online and made jokes about the way they had died, which included a girl who was hit by a train, and created cartoonish videos on YouTube. According to the Guardian newspaper, the judge called the case an example of the “harm and damage” that malicious behaviour on social networking sites may have. “You have cause untold stress to already grieving friend and family,” the judge said. Mr. Duffy was also ordered to stay off Facebook and any other social networking sites for five years.

Of course they only arrest guys for this kind of thing. It isn’t like as if the authorities arrest women when they spread rumors that some guy is a rapist that they have never met. Not only is this wrong to arrest people for telling jokes… it’s unconstitutional in the United States. I’m getting tired of this attitude towards our freedoms. …and yes I realize it is in the U.K., but I figured they had evolved or something. Our rights are lost… just about everywhere.

Al-Juhani accuses the head of al-Huta’s environmental health section of trying to pressure more than 200 shop owners into paying 5,000 Saudi riyals (US$1,333) each as a contribution to the annual banquet the municipality gives to mark the end of the fasting month Ramadan. The article says that the health inspector abused his position by threatening to impose fines against the shop owners if they failed to comply. Al-Juhani told Human Rights Watch that his sources were shop owners, a high municipal official, and a local journalist.Al-Juhani also told Human Rights Watch that the health official filed a complaint against al-Juhani, asking the court to punish him and award official damages for harm suffered. The prosecutor, on December 6, 2010, charged al-Juhani with criminal defamation. Al-Juhani should not be criminally prosecuted for what he wrote, regardless of the truth of his allegations, because of the chilling effect of criminal sanctions on peaceful expression, Human Rights Watch said. If the official considers the article defamatory, he should file a civil suit for compensation for any claimed harm to his reputation. In considering civil suits, Saudi courts should consider the importance of freedom of expression in respecting the right of journalists to write about public figures.

Saudi Arabia has no written criminal law defining defamation or any attendant penalties. Defining the elements of a crime and any penalty remains up to the individual judge’s interpretation of Sharia precepts. In addition to the country’s Sharia courts, there are executive tribunals for labor, commercial, and media disputes under the respective ministries. Although the tribunal judging press violations is not an independent court, in several cases Saudi journalists preferred that this executive body rather than Sharia courts review matters relating to the media. Sharia courts in the 2005 and 2006 have tried cases for criminal defamation in media publications before ministerial instructions transferred them to the Culture and Information Ministry.via hrw.org

…that is if you trust my source… which has not been reputable in regards to Israel. I do admit that it gets redundant to point out the flaws in Saudi society and I suppose HRW does it to show that there is some kind of fairness. The reality is there isn’t. This story is probably not outstanding. The irony is in America today… especially in the state of Washington we have a situation where the state is doing to same thing to men and they do it for feminists. The ability to write the TRUTH (even if you disagree about what TRUTH is) should not be taken away.